Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals

This weekend, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, lots of Democratic politicians, Republican politicians and corporate weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel companies and Wall Street will engage in their annual performance praising Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy of non-violence and racial harmony. This particularly disgusting in 2024 as Biden is pouring weapons into Israel fueling the slaughter of Palestin...

Bob and Scott talk with author, labor historian and activist Jeremy Brecher who’s been engaged at the intersection of labor, the environment and the climate for decades. Over 50 years ago, Jeremy authored "Strike," a labor history classic. And then more recently he's worked at the intersection of the labor and climate movements. We talk with Jeremy about strikes, unions and union lea...

The most recent United Nations Climate Conference resulted in an agreement between nearly 200 nations about the next steps in dealing with the climate crisis. It included for the first time ever language around transitioning away from fossil fuels. Heralded in some quarters as "the end of the era of fossil fuels," critics say the deal is filled with loopholes that will undermine efforts...

In our final show of 2023 (which means we've now done 4 calendar years of episodes) we look back on the lives we lost this past year, with a special discussion of the brilliant Left historian Arno Mayer and the important legacy he's left us. We also gave tribute to John Pilger, Dan Ellsberg, Harry Belafonte, Norman Lear, Tom Smothers, and lots of others. We also talk about the work of organizers a...

In our latest scrappy episode, the Green & Red Gang segues from its this week in radical history discussion of the Christmas Bombings of 1972 to a comparison of the way that the U.S. fought, and holds responsibility for, the brutal wars in Vietnam and Gaza. We also talk about the latest United Nations Conference of Parties on the climate crisis (COP28). Held in a notorious petrostate, the Unit...

In our latest episode, Scott talks with Josh Davidson (@certaindays) co-editor of "Rattling the Cages," about his new oral history of political prisoners in North America. Josh, along with co-editor Eric King, has put together over 35 interviews of political prisoners and former political prisoners. From members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Front to whistle-blower...

In this Scrappy episode, Scott and Bob talk about the current Israeli destruction of Gaza, with an emphasis on the long-term displacement and death of the Palestinians. We start with western policies at the end of the Ottoman Empire, the European colonization of the Middle East, and the American "special relationship" with Israel. Then we just discuss the pain of the current attack and h...

Joe Biden continues to subsidize and sponsor Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza and ignoring an already huge and growing antiwar movement. Yet the Democrats keep cramming him down the voters' throats despite abysmal polling numbers. And when he loses, they will blame the Left. Another terrible week in Gaza with 7,000 killed by Israel's war crimes. We're also seeing escalations in ea...

The Philippines is one of the deadliest countries in the world for environmental defenders, with 30 environmentalists murdered there in 2018. Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte notoriously called land and environmental activists communist sympathizers and terrorists in an effort to silence them. In August, 2019, human rights activist and land defender Brandon Lee was the target of an ass...

Henry Kissinger died last week after 100 years of death and destruction. More than most, he embodied the foreign policy establishment. Kissinger was an architect of liberal post-war foreign policy and perpetrator of many wars, coups and body counts. He advised every president from JFK to Joe Biden. While many liberals reviled him, he mentored many policy makers in Democratic administrations includ...

Far-right libertarian and dictatorship apologist Javier Milei has been elected president of Argentina, defeating centrist Peronist Sergio Massa. Milei won 56% of the vote, carrying 19 out of 23 provinces. He has been seen on the campaign trail brandishing a chainsaw, which he says he plans to take to the Argentine state. He has vowed to shut down Argentina’s central bank, replace the nation’s curr...

It's been 60 years since JFK was assassinated and a major industry has developed to write about it, question the official story of Lee Harvey Oswald, and most importantly to revise the historical record of John Kennedy to make him seem heroic, a dove who'd seen the errors of American power and the Cold War. Because of this, the Kennedy Conspiracy Clique argues, the so-called Deep State had...

Last week, the San Francisco Bay Area was the center of the political and media world as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) convened CEO summit and heads of state summit to divvy up the global economy for the billionaire class. This included a high profile meeting between Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping. In response, a movement of movements (consisting of antiwar, labor, human ri...

In our latest, we talk with Prof. Greg Shupak (@gregshupak) about the media's coverage of Israel's bloody assault in Gaza. He's one of the best-informed and important scholars of the media and Israel, and he here discussed the way the media treats Israel-Palestine issues, how it perpetuates Israel's stories and lies, how journalists are being targeted by the IDF in Gaza, and how we...

In Green & Red's latest "Scrappy Sunday," we talk about how American moved so far to the right so fast . . . . starting with the 1960s, when Nixon ran a hard-hitting campaign against liberalism, through Carter, who embraced neo-liberalism and abandoned the core of Democratic ideology, through the total buy-in of corporatist policies with Clinton and Obama, the Democratic Party ha...

In Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the United States, 98% of teachers voted to authorize a strike. Filmmakers Yoni Golijov and Yael Bridge shadowed L.A. teachers for five months as they organize and strike, providing a unique first-hand account of collective democracy and labor action, and shedding light on the nationwide teacher strike upswell. Their film "When We Fight&qu...

61 years ago this month, in October 1962, Americans anxiously heard news for almost two weeks straight about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, less than 100 miles away from the U.S. Nuclear War was possible, to some imminent. In this encore episode from 2022, we offer a brief history of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, more importantly, a remembrance and reconsideration of the events of Octobe...

In the latest, Scott talks with Will Wiltschko, director of the California Trade Justice Coalition (@catradejustice) about the upcoming Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco. They discuss the history of free trade, resistance to corporate globalization and the large diverse coalition coming together to protest the APEC meetings. They also talk about the Indo-Pacific Econ...

As we watch the Middle East blow up with brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel and a murderous ethnic cleansing campaign by Israel on Gaza, the conflict in Syria, Turkey and Kurdistan has been getting less attention. In the autonomous region of Northeastern Syria known as Rojava, Kurdish Peoples' Militias have fought ISIS, Assad's authoritarian regime and Turkey brutal military. In our latest,...

We're back from a brief hiatus with our "damnatio memoriae" of the late Dianne Feinstein and her husband financier Richard Blum. We get into their sorted history of politics, money and corruption. Feinstein represents some of the worst tendencies of American and San Francisco liberals. Both facing the culture war as those falsely championing justice and equality, while bilking worker...

No sleep til Brooklyn! This week, Scott joined the hipster Brooklyn left and is rolling through the mean streets of New York for UN Climate Week. On Thursday, there was a mass blockade of Citibank’s headquarters over their funding of the climate crisis. Hundreds of Citi employees forced to were wait on the street before returning to work and torching the planet. Sunday is the mass march to “End Fo...

The Sierra Club is one of the oldest and largest environmental groups in the U.S.. It also has a problematic history, from being founded by racist John Muir to members penning the racist "Population Bomb," advocating for population control, to former director Carl Pope promoting corporate greenwashing. Earlier this year, politician Ben Jealous became the organization's new executive...

"The Other 9/11" occurred 50 years ago, a military-organized coup against the Socialist President of Chile Salvador Allende, with the support of U.S. and Australian operatives. In a fantastic discussion we talked with two authorities on the topic, Rodrigo Acuña and Clinton Ferdandes, who discussed the background of the U.S. role in Latin America in the Cold War, the background of Allende's politic...

Happy Labor Day tender ones! Here is a repost of our May Day episode from 2021. In it, Bob and  Scott talk about the history of May Day from pagan rituals to the Haymarket Affair to International Workers' Day to Labor Day and Loyalty Day.  And we discuss how the ruling class's "war on the left" fits into  the politics of May Day vs. Labor Day. Spend an hour of your Labor Day weekend hearing about...

A few weeks ago the New York Times published a hit piece on Jodie Evans and her partner Neville Roy Singham as well as Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental and others, accusing them of organizing front groups to spread Chinese propaganda. These are groups which are advocating No Cold War and peace with China, but to the U.S. establishment they are threats. Bob had a great conversation w/ Jodie Evans, a...